Scaled Onboarding Programs

Agenda:

Join us for a discussion with Izzy Carey, Manager of Customer Success and Activation at Ramp, as she shares insights on how her team has enhanced the customer onboarding experience. We’ll explore the challenges they faced, the solutions they implemented to improve efficiency, and how they’re now measuring their success. Additionally, we’ll talk about the future of her team as they continue to identify challenges and streamline the onboarding process.

The session will be moderated by Sam David, Digital Customer Success Program Manager at monday.com.

Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I'm Sam, the Digital CS Program Manager at Monday.com and the host of these new monthly virtual meetups. I’m doing these in coordination with Scott Wilder and Alex Turk. Our goal is to hold these on the second Thursday of each month, featuring different leaders in the scaling digital space. They will share insights, valuable takeaways, and lessons you can directly apply to your role or organization.

We aim to keep these sessions very tactical. Our first session is focused on scaling onboarding—a hot topic in scaling digital. We have Izzy from Ramp, Manager of Scaled Success, who will share what onboarding looked like before, during, and after they applied a scaled approach.

Before I hand it over to Izzy, I want to remind everyone about the Q&A box. Feel free to add questions during her presentation, and we’ll have about 20 minutes at the end for you to unmute and ask questions directly. We welcome any feedback or insights for the team at Ramp as well.

We want to keep this collaborative, so if Izzy asks questions or seeks input, feel free to share your experiences with scaling onboarding. Use the chat, unmute yourself, or turn on your video if you’re comfortable. With that, I’ll pass it over to Izzy.

Hi, everyone. As Sam mentioned, I’m Izzy, and I manage the Scaled CSM team at Ramp. For those who may not be familiar, Ramp is a finance automation platform that helps businesses save time and money. Our goal is to streamline financial operations, offering corporate cards, expense management, vendor management, accounting automation, and bill pay. We recently launched a travel spend management platform, which integrates into our suite of products.

My team focuses on activation. We’re the first point of contact post-sales, working closely with our self-service resources and community team. Our success is measured by product adoption and utilization. In short, we aim for full activation of more clients in less time using a mix of one-on-one and one-to-many interactions. We encourage clients to use self-service materials, such as community-led webinars and training guides.

Today, I’ll cover the problem statement we faced this year, the solutions we proposed during Q1 and launched in Q2, how we measure success, and some key findings and current challenges.

Before diving into the problem statement, I want to explain how we categorize accounts for onboarding. We base success on client size and estimated spend with Ramp. Smaller accounts, spending up to $15K, go to our lifecycle team, which focuses on webinars and self-service content. Accounts spending $15K to $100K are managed by my scaled client success team, where accounts are distributed through a round-robin model. We also have a new Commercial Account Manager (AM) role, a hybrid of CSM and AM, for small to mid-sized accounts.

Going into this year, we faced the challenge of maximizing the use of our scaled CSM team members to onboard more clients efficiently. In Q1, the team handled only 20-30 accounts per rep per month, resulting in less than 200 accounts per month for the entire team. This was problematic since many new accounts lacked CSM support. While we had some groundwork in Salesforce and Looker, our processes were manual, and systems were not fully integrated.

We found that 30 days wasn’t enough for direct assignments, leading to complexity and a lack of clear long-term vision. Additionally, our email alias, [email protected], was overloaded with tickets, resulting in backlog and inefficiency.

To address these challenges, we proposed extending the ownership period to 60 days and implemented a group onboarding focus. This allowed us to reserve one-on-one time for high-value accounts. We also introduced automated email sequences tailored to each client’s journey. With these changes, clients could rely on support for basic product questions while turning to their scaled CSMs for strategy.

We streamlined the handoff process between pre-sales and scaled CSMs, moving from a pod model to a round-robin approach, which ensured a more balanced distribution of accounts. This new process was a step in the right direction, enabling better engagement with new clients.

Our key success metrics include “perfect onboarding”—ensuring that 75% of accounts have key platform features set up within 60 days. We also track contribution profit, which measures how much clients move over to Ramp during their onboarding period. Clients with perfect onboarding tend to have 40% higher long-term spend.

Some wins include ensuring that 50% of our net new clients received CSM support, which wasn’t possible before. We’ve also exceeded our goals for onboarding and contribution profit. However, we faced challenges like over-relying on group sessions at the start, which led us to adjust the threshold for one-on-one calls.

Change management has been crucial. Sunsetting the [email protected] email was a major shift, and it required partnering with pre-sales teams to create new templates and processes. Listening to their concerns and offering resources made the transition smoother.

Looking ahead, we aim to centralize resources and simplify our playbook. We also need to address inbox challenges, ensuring clients understand when to use support vs. their scaled CSM. Additionally, we continue to work on improving our product and building an integrated client experience.

Thank you, everyone, for your questions and participation today. We hope to see you at next month's session. After this, we'll share the recording via email, and it will be available on the website within 24 hours. We’ll also send out a feedback form to gather your input and suggestions for future topics. Thanks again to Izzy for sharing your insights!